Alone I Break
by Chichuri
Summary: Middle of 3.09 Veronica's breakdown in the shower


**Pairing/Character:** Veronica  
**Rating:** PG-13  
**Spoilers:** 3.9

**Disclaimer:** Veronica Mars is not mine, of course.

**Author's note:** The title is from the song by Korn--although I'm ashamed to admit it took me a half hour to remember where I snagged it from.

**Alone I Break**

Consumed by her frenetic attempts to be gaily normal, Veronica hadn't realized she was broken. Now, tears lost to the water pounding down on her and every barrier she had used to prop herself together crumbled and swirled away, she knows she is irreversibly damaged.

Last June, when the world tilted beneath her feet and left her destroyed, Logan had been the one who picked her up, convincing her with words and body that she was not alone, his embrace holding secure the pieces she would have let scatter. Even as sobs rip through her chest she wants to laugh at the bitter irony that this time he is the one who has leveled her. After all her fears of letting him close enough to hurt her, she finally understands he had laid hooks into her heart long ago and the very walls she had placed to protect herself have left her bereft.

Logan believes if he acts now the pain will be survivable? She wishes she could be so detached. The last time she felt this lost and alone, her only escape had been to become someone else.

She remembers the sweet, misguided child she once was. Young and naive, that Veronica thought her world had ended when Duncan broke up with her. Only weeks later had she truly started to understand the definition of world-ending pain, when she saw her best friend sprawled bonelessly at pool's edge, brains and blood spilling out from a wound no doctor could make better. Lilly's death drove spikes through her heart and gut, and Veronica had thought the tears would never end.

The next blow had been the betrayal of everyone she thought was her friend. The agony of Lilly's death so overshadowed everything else that the pain, a thousand cuts of harsh words and harsher pranks, barely registered. The greatest importance of this second event was that it had led to the third, a noxious misery of roiling stomachs and half remembered nightmares, fragments of violation both kinder and more terrible than any fully realized memory of the experience could have been.

She had hardened and become brittle, but had endured until maternal abandonment removed one of the few constants she had left. Her mother breezed out of her life leaving a trite and meaningless note, a trinket of the innocence Veronica had lost, and a gaping hole in her soul where the certainty of a mother's love was supposed to reside. That final hammer strike left jagged shards of the girl Lilly had known. Veronica took those remnants and reworked the pieces into someone different, turning the barricade she had built to protect herself against the world into the whole person and banishing to the depths of her being the last scraps of the innocence, trust and naiveté that had defined her youth. She hacked off her long blonde hair and transformed her entire wardrobe, outward symbols of the death of the child she had been and the birth of the woman she had become.

She had thought no one would ever again be able to hurt her that deeply, and her reaction to Duncan's departure scant months after they had rediscovered each other seemed to prove her right. When her adolescent dream of true love was forced to leave forever for parts unknown, the older Veronica gave him a wistful farewell, regretting the loss of youthful fancies more than the loss of the boy himself. Her smug complacency was toppled by Logan's soft admission that he couldn't take being with her any more. Despite having definitions of pain no sane human being should ever have to understand, that Logan no longer wants her feels like a world ending, persona redefining agony.

Not once has she been able to predict that change is about to surge through her life, tossing aside any certainty she has managed to regain and crushing hopes she never knew had awakened in her heart. She has always been a little bit blind when it comes to those she loves.

The emotional riptide drags her the rest of the way under as the last of the control she has been fighting for all day shatters. Tears burn her eyes and sobs threaten to shake her apart. When her legs give out she sinks to the floor of the shower, barely registering that the water beating down on her head and shoulders and cascading across her skin has turned to liquid ice. She clutches her knees, digging her fingernails in deep in a hopeless attempt to ease the shudders.

Be it through pleasure or pain, Logan has always been able to muffle her regimented intellect and unleash an emotional response. Now that he has taken away the pleasure, all she has left is the pain, a gnawing torture of might-have-beens and never-will-bes she brought on herself. Her mistrust, her pathological need not to depend on anyone else, drove away the one person who had accepted everything she was. Despite the terrors she has faced down and defeated, she wasn't brave enough to reach out and embrace the shelter Logan had offered and she has to live with the bitter consequences of her own inadequacies.

Once upon a time, she put the pieces of her shattered life back together, but the damage has never healed. Now, even when she tries, she doesn't know how to be anyone other than the untrusting, cynical creature born of tragedy and betrayal.

The tears and shaking slow as exhaustion takes hold. She tries to remember she may have lost Logan, but she is not truly alone. She has a father who walked through fire for her and friends who have gone to the wall for her. These are the people who love her. They will do anything for the bright and perky Veronica Mars, intrepid girl detective and kick-ass problem solver. For them, she will be strong. She will pick herself up, box away the pain, and keep going. In the end that is the only thing she knows how to do. It will have to be enough.

But for this one moment, before she nails her facade back in place, she will lose herself in the pain.


End file.
